Keeping Ranchers and Farmers Safe in Later Life

Professor Randolph R. Weigel
Project Director

Wyoming AgrAbility

Aging is a natural process with implications for agricultural safety and health.

Although many ranchers and farmers make allowances for age-related reductions in physical strength, speed, agility, sight and hearing, they can no longer handle some routine work tasks. Ranchers and farmers become more susceptible to work-related injuries as they move into their 60s.

Age-Related Changes as Risk Factors in Ranchers and Farmers

Age-related sensory and physical impairments occur among senior agricultural operators at various rates. Eyesight, hearing, balance, muscle strength, and reaction time may remain good for some who are well beyond age 65, while becoming significantly poorer in others.

Vision: As a person ages, there is a gradual decline in the ability of the eye to detect normal environmental stimuli. The ability to work safely is highly dependent on the ability to see objects clearly at different distances, distinguish colors, quickly adapt to changing light conditions and focus both eyes on an object. Generally, to see objects as clearly as they did when they were age 20, many 45 year olds need four times as much light. By age 60, the amount of light required to see clearly is double that needed by 45 year olds.

Hearing: In addition to normal hearing loss, studies suggest agricultural workers of all ages have higher levels of noise-induced hearing loss than the general population.

Such losses result from excessive exposure to loud noise from tractors, field and farmstead machinery, animals and other sources. Senior farmers who have difficulty hearing words or sounds may not be able to detect warning signals, such as the sounding of an automobile horn, the approach of a fast-moving animal or the warning yell of a coworker.

Sense of Balance: An individual's sense of balance is controlled by specialized structures (the vestibular system) in the inner ear. The structures provide information about the position of the head and also sense the speed and direction of body movements. With aging, the vestibular system becomes less effective in sensing body position and movement and could result in dizziness.

Some situations in which the loss of balance and a feeling of dizziness increase the risk of injury for senior farmers include driving, walking across an uneven surface such as cut hay in a hayfield, or even moving about in a small fishing boat.  Dizziness or loss of balance around machinery poses a particularly serious safety risk of seniors falling into moving or unguarded parts of equipment.

Muscle Strength: Flexibility in the joints of the shoulders, arms and legs, adequate muscle strength, and good posture also are important for senior safety. Aging causes collagen, the main supportive protein in the skin, tendons, joint cartilage, and connective tissues, to become irregular in shape.

The irregularly shaped collagen may reduce spine flexibility and create pain and discomfort in many working situations such as the manipulation of machinery controls, lifting, carrying and loading objects, mounting and dismounting machinery and climbing up and down stairs. Reduced muscle strength often compounds joint impairments like arthritis, rheumatism, bursitis and frozen shoulder.